This painting By Thomas Ryan is a photorealist work that mimics reality as closely as possible. It is a still life study; a still life is an artwork that depicts any inanimate object such as food, flowers, rocks or shell for example. Still life studies date back centuries with examples found in ancient Egyptian tombs and Roman mosaics. From about the seventeenth century until the beginning of the twentieth century still life paintings were not considered as important as portraits or mythical or religious paintings. But they became important again in the early twentieth century when many artists such as Pablo Picasso and George Braque used still lives to experiment with abstraction.